“We can do it all here” - Interview with Premier Alan Winde

BY FIONA WAKELIN & KOKETSO MAMABOLO

“I want to say that this country is worth fighting for,” declares Western Cape Premier Alan Winde, speaking to Public Sector Leaders. “We have got such amazing people and amazing stories in this province, and in this country.” The Premier believes that anything is possible for the Western Cape, and its achievements, and the potential it has, need to be shared proudly with the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. His contribution is to make sure that potential is realised. “It’s about making sure that the province does things that are above and beyond.”

RESOLVING CHALLENGES

Premier Winde loves a challenge. Before he tackled public sector problems he was an entrepreneur who was driven by the need to have fresh problems that need solutions. “If I think back to the days when I was starting businesses, I always loved the challenge,” says the Premier. “What are you going to do about it? Let’s get some people together. Let’s put some investment in. Let’s create this business to solve that problem.”

In 1996, while living in Belvidere, in the Greater Knysna area, the Premier was faced with a challenge, the solution for which propelled him into a career in government. Faced with a choice between only two parties in the local elections at the time, the Premier raised his concern at a community meeting and “long story short, eventually I was convinced to be the independent candidate, which was how I got myself elected against those two political parties.”

One and a half decades later, he was asked to join then newly-elected Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s provincial cabinet as the Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Finance and Economic Development. He served in former Premier Zille’s cabinet for two terms, mostly in Finance but also working in other departments related to the economy.

Having spent almost a decade working in the provincial government, few were as suited to the role of leading the province as the Premier was. In government he found a place with evolving challenges which he can bring people together to solve, improving the well-being of citizens and delivering services.

“If I think back to the days when I was starting businesses, I always loved the challenge”

MAKING THE PROVINCE SAFER

The Premier understands the knock-on effect safety challenges can have on residents, and early in his career in provincial government he sought to gain more knowledge and a better perspective on ensuring the safety of people in the Western Cape. Speaking about his first appointment in 2009, he says, “I personally elected to become the Minister of Community Safety a couple of months before the election, just so I could get my head around safety because I knew that safety - crime - was the biggest inhibitor.”

“The biggest inhibitor to economic growth, the biggest inhibitor to citizen’s ability to take forward themselves or better themselves,” he says passionately.

In 2019, the Premier implemented a plan to address safety in the province. “At that stage in being elected, we were the murder capital of South Africa,” he highlights, in reference to the highest murder per capita rate which reflected a worrying trend which he recognised the need to address proactively, rather than merely reacting to flare-ups in crime. His vision is clearly articulated in the safety plan document, which involves approaching the problem from two directions: “The Western Cape Safety Plan will be achieved through a focus on increasing law enforcement presence where and when crime happens,” reads the document, “and through strengthening society’s resilience to crime at several levels: in families, in the school environment, amongst youth at risk, as a result of the harms caused by substance abuse and alcohol abuse, through increased safety in public spaces and by strengthening social cohesiveness and connectedness.”

The first approach, reacting to crime and increasing the presence of law enforcement, gave birth to the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) officers. “We’ve deployed, so far, 1 100 officers to the 13 hotspot areas. Those are the areas with policing precincts - and they all happen to be in the city [Cape Town], in our province - with the highest murder per capita rates.”

An additional 135 officers form part of the LEAP reaction units, which takes the total number of officers deployed to 1 235. The deployment is based on data, and the reaction units were formed to respond to unpredictable spikes in crimes where additional officers may be required from time-to-time, which solved the problem of having to move officers out of one area to deal with short-term problems in another.

“And in the latest stats that have just come out now [in August], we’ve seen that, out of the top 30 murder stations in the country, [of those] that came down, nine were in the areas we’ve deployed officers,” says the Premier, highlighting the 42% drop in Mitchell Plain’s murder rate as part of the success.

The second approach, the proactive one, is still ongoing but stems from the question of what can be done to build a safer society. “How do you make sure that we don’t have that criminal mindset and that everything defaults to crime; that, in actual fact, we are getting safer?” says the Premier.

“How do we identify boys at risk and how do they get put into programmes instead of becoming truant, not doing their schoolwork and then eventually ending up not going to school and ending up in a gang?

“How do we get them through programmes to make sure that they become a risk-taker, not in the illicit economy as a gangster, but a risk-taker as an entrepreneur of the future?

“And that’s linked to the education question - social development, economic development. How do you get into those identified areas that you really do bring in meaningful change? You can’t police your way out of it.” Preparing learners for the future “Education is about preparing our youth for a future that they want to envisage for themselves. We’ve got to enable them to be significant role players in our future and to be competitive,” says the Premier, speaking on what’s being done for learners in the province.

His approach has been exemplified by viewing the Education Department as a part of the economic, rather than the social cluster. In order to drive this he appointed MEC David Mynier, who was previously at the helm of the Finance and Economic Development portfolio, as the MEC for Education. The MEC has been tasked with answering the question of how learners can be equipped to participate in economic life.

One of the challenges the MEC faces is catering to the educational needs of a growing population. “Our population growth is projected to grow by another 1.4 million people over the next seven and a half years. “To give you an indication, the number of people [coming into the province] is going to be like adding Bloemfontein to Cape Town, in only seven and a half years,” notes the Premier.

“Bloemfontein has got 186 schools, so that means we’ve got to add 186 schools to Cape Town in the next seven and a half years.” In order to meet this demand, there will need to be greater engagement with private and public schools to ensure the system can cope.

“Education is about preparing our youth for a future that they want to envisage for themselves. We’ve got to enable them to be significant role players in our future and to be competitive”

For existing schools, the provincial government has invested billions in providing broadband internet access across the province, which will allow the system to not only improve the service offering, but also allow it to reach more learners. “Already over 20 of them are connected at 100 megabits per second. 1 400 of our schools are connected at around 10 megabits per second.” The rapid increase in connectivity has led to the province’s schools using more data per day than all the other schools in the rest of the country combined. “If you look at the stuff that’s happening around our online schools, it really is amazing to see innovation around new schools that are there for skills and not necessarily only for academics,” says the Premier. “It’s about schools that are designed for demand.”

THE POST-COVID ECONOMY

“After the first wave [of COVID-19 infections] and going into the second wave, we already said, ‘hang on a second, we need to refocus on the economy because we were losing livelihoods and because businesses were really battling,” says the Premier, when asked about his plans for job creation. At that time, the focus was on recovering from the economic impact of the pandemic in 2021.

“But now what we’re busy with is the sort of second round, and we’re actually going through some policy work right at the moment to say, ‘what else should we be doing now after COVID?’” he says, before touching on a sector which was heavily impacted: tourism. “In tourism we’re now starting to see the numbers come back. Have we got the ability to deal with the growth?” The Premier sees lessons which can be learnt from what regions such as Europe and Asia had to go through in its summer months.

“We’ve really got to look at that whole value chain so that when tourism comes back, we’ve learned lessons that the northern hemisphere have through now in this summer season.” Domestic tourism seems to have recovered, but “international is coming back a little bit slower”. This has prompted the province to increase its focus on marketing to attract forward bookings. Interestingly, the Premier found that during the lockdowns in Europe, many African tourists chose to come to South Africa when they would normally spend time visiting Europe.

“I think the pandemic has also got people to understand that they don’t have to go to the big city, they can actually go to our towns. We’re seeing that from an investment point of view.”

“People travel first, look, decide and then move,” says the Premier, highlighting how the conferencing industry can have an impact on inspiring business people, who visit for work, to come back with their families. “We’ve got a product that can hold its own against any business in the world, any region in the world.”

“We’ve really got to look at that whole value chain so that when tourism comes back, we’ve learned lessons that the northern hemisphere have through now in this summer season”

AN ENABLING ENVIRONMENT

One of the aspects that contributes to job creation and the growth of the economy is the development of infrastructure, which forms a significant part of the Premier’s plans, as evidenced by the creation of a department dedicated to infrastructure development. “Their mandate is anything and everything around infrastructure in this province.”

The other newly-formed department is the Mobility Department which looks to address the questions the province needs to answer such as: “How do people and goods meet? How do learners get to school? How do workers get to work? How do goods get to the port or to markets or to citizens?” MEC Daylin Mitchell was appointed to lead the portfolio in April this year.

At the heart of the provincial government’s approach to transport challenges is an understanding that the public sector cannot do it alone. “We’ve got to make sure that we build this network of a governmentenabled regulatory environment with entities that enable private sector investment and operation.”

Having been the MEC for Economic Development, more than a decade ago, when the provincial government set up Green Cape, which was created as a vehicle for the green economy, it’s no wonder that the Premier’s response to being asked if he sees sustainability as a key economic driver, his answer is an emphatic “yes!”. “Way back then we said, ‘listen, let’s set up this organisation used to facilitate the future of green, the future of green jobs and the green economy.” This work on sustainable development has resulted in the City of Cape Town having the capacity to lighten the impact of loadshedding, through over 3 000 independent power producers, who are using renewable energy to meet demand, with plans for expanding the programme. This focus on sustainable development spreads to agriculture as well, an industry which the province is actively engaging the private sector to drive up investment. Sustainable practices will have an impact on the export market, a signal for the local industry to keep up with the changing times. “It is critical that we get that right because we know that it’s not only for ourselves and our planet here, but it’s also for our ability to compete in the market,” emphasises the Premier.

LESSONS LEARNT, BRIDGES BUILT

When asked what his “aha!” moment has been, the Premier reflects on what he saw during the pandemic: “I think some of the things that we achieved during the sort of height of COVID, when we were innovating, when we were developing partnerships to deliver meds or building hospitals or coming up with new ways of treating patients to save lives or getting food coordinated.” The pandemic response showed the Premier what’s possible.

By the kind of inspirational people he’d like to have at his dinner table (Louis Armstrong, Steve Jobs, and his family, among others), it’s clear that he has a penchant for creating solutions that can inspire more solutions. His preferred dessert, a selection of local cheeses and cognac, shows that he is someone who walks the walk, confident in what this country has to offer.

“We can do it all here. We can bring about the change here. And that’s why I do what I do and that’s what I believe my job is here in the province.”